Erdoğan’s discourse in Sunni regions

One of the themes President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterates at the meetings he attends with representatives of the Islamic world is that the West does not desire our wellbeing - a fact he does not have to put a lot of effort into proving. The history of the last two centuries realistically demonstrates the validity of this viewpoint, especially in Middle Eastern countries. When you add spurious U.S. interventions in Iraq, explanations based on the West's opportunism are replaced by ones exposing its harmful intentions. And today, their indifference to the massacres taking place in Syria does not seem like innocent helplessness at all.

It should be underlined that the Islamic world is not categorically against the West. The social contact between the two "worlds" is increasing, and the cultural and aesthetic attraction of the West preserves its dominance. Also, we are talking about a Middle East in which daily life is rapidly Westernizing due to globalization. There are also Islamic administrations that maintain good relations with the U.S. and the EU. However, social dynamics have now put a distance between the communities and administrations in Islamic regions. The sustainability of the current administrations is related to the international preservation and fortification of the power relations from the past with an international plan. The social legitimacy of those administrations diminishes every day, and this is the reason why politics in this region leans toward more "primitive" identity conflicts.

The values developed by the West, ironically, lie at the heart of these dynamics. The search for freedom and democracy was highly affected by modernistic criticisms from Western intellectual circles. It is no longer possible to be content with the ideas of freedom and democracy as asserted by the classic liberal viewpoint. We are not living in a world where everyone's identity melts into national citizenship. Even though the West seems to have historically managed such a feat to a great extent, it has still been defeated in the face of globalization. Immigrant politics, particularly, has created a huge problem in Europe. But this kind of citizenship was never formed in the Middle East. Consequently, the post-modern period caused everyone in the Middle Eastern Islamic world to restore their factory settings, namely, to turn towards to their own identities. Just as with the example of Yugoslavia, this led to a harsh conflict of accumulated dissolutions.

These incidents actually constituted a historical test in terms of the West, and it cannot be said that they understood its implications. On the contrary, U.S. policies made fatal errors. It was possible to pass the test by supporting fair solutions for the region, and adopting a perspective freed from identity. However, the Western perspective generally underlined the "Sunni threat," and created a cautionary politics around this notion. Supporting the government of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq and President Bashar Assad in Syria were terrible mistakes. It is not because they are Shiite, but because they implemented the coarsest examples of identity politics.

Now, Sunni communities in the Middle East are blaming the West for this attitude, and the perception of the West is worsening every day. For this reason, it is certain that Erdoğan's discourse will greatly appeal to the people in the region. Erdoğan does not have a romantic view of who the authorities he addresses are, and how they will behave. He underlines on every occasion that the administrations in this region are actually in charge of the situation in the Middle East. But he has a dual message, and one of them is for the West. He demands the creation of a democratic perspective in the real sense, and a change in behavior from the West. The second directly addresses Sunni communities in which he reminds them that they are not bound to these administrations.